The village wasn’t extremely large as it housed three churches, a school and some cemeteries. The 1855 Census reported 264 residents there. At the time, anything beyond Manhattan’s 59th street was underdeveloped or rural in nature. As a campaign to create a large public park in the middle of the city went underway, organizers realized Manhattan didn’t have enough space to cater to developing such a space. So the media began to paint the village as a place for squatters, even though most of the land was owned by Black business people.
The perception that Seneca Village was less than savory began to spread, and the village was razed to construct the park. The community tried to fight it, heading to the courts to save their land but the government claimed eminent domain, paving the way to eviction. Some villagers were reportedly evicted by violent means and ultimately ousted for good on October 1, 1857. To this day, no living descendants of the village dwellers have been found nor was there any record of where they resettled.
The village largely fell out of public memory but thanks to the efforts of the Seneca Village Project, the village’s history is better known. Despite claims in the press that it was a poor and rundown section of town, the Project states that Seneca Village was in fact a middle-class Black neighborhood.
In 2001, the city of New York placed a Historical Marker in the place where Seneca Village once stood in Central Park.
(Photo taken by Ed Yourdon)
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